Hi everyone, I need some advice about my immigration situation.
My husband and I came to the US in March 2015 with tourist visas and filed for asylum before our permitted stay ended. I’m the main applicant on the asylum case. We’ve been waiting for almost 9 years now and still haven’t gotten a decision.
Because it’s taking so long, my husband wants to try applying for an EB2 National Interest Waiver. He thinks he qualifies because he’s a licensed electrical engineer in Texas with 8 years of work experience here. He has his bachelor’s degree plus the required experience and works on important power grid projects.
What we want to know is whether he can file for EB2-NIW while our asylum case is still going through the system. Will having a pending asylum application cause problems with the NIW petition? Should we be worried about any negative effects on either case?
We’ve always maintained legal status and never overstayed. Any advice would be really helpful since we’re not sure if this is a good idea or if it might hurt our chances.
This sounds familiar - we had a client in the same situation last year. Filing EB2-NIW with pending asylum usually works fine since they’re separate processes, but you’ll need to handle the immigrant intent vs. asylum claim carefully. Your husband’s engineering background looks promising for NIW though. Have you talked to an immigration attorney who does both asylum and employment cases? They’ll know how to avoid conflicts between the applications.
We had a client in the same boat - 7 years waiting on asylum. The trick was proving the NIW was purely about professional qualifications, totally separate from the asylum’s humanitarian angle. Main thing: make sure the engineer’s work authorization docs are bulletproof during I-140. Any gaps will mess up both cases if they review them together.
Wait, I’m confused about something. In immigration law class, we learned asylum seekers can’t show immigrant intent - asylum’s about needing protection, not wanting to immigrate permanently. But EB2-NIW requires immigrant intent, right? How does that work when both cases are pending? My professor said this creates a legal contradiction but we didn’t go deeper. Is there a workaround that practitioners actually use?